People, process, organization and governance for the software-defined data center

Category Archives: Thought Leadership

I know it’s hard to believe, but VMworld is upon us again. Where did the last year go? I know many of you were busy implementing, updating, extending, and managing your private cloud environment. Perhaps you’re busy implementing and getting comfortable working with NSX; busy realizing the great benefits software defined networking and security brings you as an IT service provider to you line of business customers. Regardless, I’m sure you’re busy making your customers happy with the standardized and customer-driven IT services you’re providing.

So, you’re getting comfortable in your private cloud world – but not too comfortable I hope, as a recent VMware study (VMware Customer Advocacy study”, Q1 2016) shows that 48% of enterprise applications will be cloud based within 3 years. Ok, that doesn’t sound too bad. That is until you see another statistic that says 65% of enterprises will use more than one public and/or private cloud platform and for 67%, and that:

For 67% of enterprises the ideal end state includes relying on multiple cloud platforms.

Relying on multiple clouds, really?

So how are you going to deal with that? How are you going to bring order to potentially multi-cloud chaos? It’s hard enough to get a handle on the workloads your enterprise developers are placing in one public cloud, how bad is it going to get? Well, if you start planning for multi-cloud now, it may not have to be bad at all. In fact, with proper planning, you can drive a good degree of control – without all of those pesky developers even knowing the difference.

If I’ve piqued your interest – or perhaps triggered the onset of a slight panic attack, please stop by my session, SDDC8994: Taming the Hydra: IT in a Multi-Cloud World, next Monday at 3:30 at VMworld 2016, and I’ll fill you in on some concrete steps you can start taking now to avoid the chaos as well as how the looming multi-cloud world might impact your IT role. I hope to see you there.

Download a full agenda of VMworld breakout sessions that will help IT leaders build a strategy for the digital era.

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Kevin Leesis Principal Architect for VMware’s global Operations Transformation practice and is based in Colorado.

For IT to truly transform into an effective, business-focused service provider it has to do more than implement an enabling technology like software defined data center, though that’s certainly a great start. In fact, according to the recently published State of IT Transformation analysis done by EMC and VMware, 95% of participants believe having an IT organization that has no silos and works together to deliver business-focused services at the lowest cost is critical. Yet, not astonishingly based on experience, less than 4% reported they currently operate like this. That’s quite a gap!

According to the same analysis, operating without silos was one of the top 10 goals in all but one of the industries represented in the study (17 of 18 industries) and was in the top 11 for all industries. Thankfully, while there is a significant gap between desire and current state, IT operating without silos is top of mind and viewed as critical to success regardless of industry. So how do you navigate this gap? Where do you start? How do you proceed without causing an anxiety attack or worse, intransigence, within IT? In this two part blog, we’ll walk through some critical steps we use for closing this gap.

Step 1: Secure an Executive Sponsor

First and foremost you have to realize and acknowledge that the biggest challenges you will face in breaking down silos are cultural and in all likelihood political challenges. That has been my experience and that of my colleagues when working with companies to break down their IT silos. And of the two, the political challenge can be the harder to overcome. Which brings us to the first step in closing the gap: getting executive sponsorship and not just any executive sponsorship, you need proactive executive sponsorship.

You need an enthusiastic, proactive executive sponsor for this kind of change. Indeed, that’s your number one goal – to have an executive involved who completely embraces this idea and the change it requires, and who’s committed to proactively supporting you. He or she is critical to success in many ways, not the least of which in overcoming the cultural and political challenges. To overcome these challenges the executive sponsor has to have the enthusiastic support of those in the management chain of the organization in which the silos exist.

But how to you generate the enthusiasm when we know how resistant some people are to change, especially change that might affect their span of control?

Step 2: Sell the Change

Work with the executive sponsor to craft a communication plan aimed at both the management chain and the organization as a whole. When building the communication plan, you would ideally derive the intent for the change from a strategy and roadmap focused on transforming IT into a service provider to the business that has both executive and business support. If not, developing that IT transformation strategy and roadmap becomes step one!

The communication plan should focus on why you’re making the change, why it is critical for the business, and what value embracing it has for the affected IT managers and employees– what they stand to gain as individuals. And individuals do stand to gain, for example through recognition, increased visibility, opportunity to participate in something truly innovative, obtaining new skills that are highly valued in both the company and the industry, and new career opportunities. The goal is to make participating in the change aspirational. But enthusiasm only goes so far. You also have to provide them a safe way to modify their behaviour – as well as provide a little extra nudge to those in management who are still a bit reluctant to change.

Step 3: Modify Behavior

Modifying behaviour is a key step but one that is overlooked more often than not. This involves modifying annual performance review criteria, and bonus critera if applicable, to reflect the desired outcome. If this is not done individuals will default to their incentivized behaviour when prioritization decisions need to be made – or, for a few, as an excuse for not fully embracing the change. Modifying this criteria is absolutely critical for the management chain in order to help address the political challenge. It’s also important for members of the silos whose walls are to be torn down, as we’ll see in the final step.

Step 4: Break the Silos

I say the “final step” but that’s a bit of a misnomer, as the final step can take some time and consists of many activities as it is the actual breaking down of the silos. In part two of this blog I will focus on the approach we have found to be successful when undertaking this type of organizational change.

=====Kevin Leesis Principal Architect for VMware’s global Operations Transformation Practice and is based in Colorado.

IT organizations are experiencing a cultural revolution. CIOs want to run IT like a customer-focused business. They want to empower users with self-service and enable them to make value-based consumption decisions. This means packaging IT services for easy consumption by the business, providing financial transparency through unit-based pricing and billing, and developing processes, roles, and skills to successfully manage the supply and demand side of the portfolio.

As I mentioned in my last blog, EMC and VMware have been doing workshops on IT transformation with our customers for several years now. We recently analyzed the data collected during these workshops. The top gap, identified by all organizations, is their ability to provide and efficiently manage user requests through a service catalog and self-service portal. 80% plan to have a self-service portal and service catalog in place by the 2016-2017 timeframe.

The ‘State of IT Transformation’ report takes a look at more than 660 EMC and VMware enterprise customers across 18 industries, and identifies gaps, progress and goals in their current IT Transformation initiatives.

By focusing on data provided by CIOs and their direct reports who participated in a transformation workshop led by EMC or VMware, this analysis provides deep insight into the biggest goals and challenges for organizations who are actually in the midst of an IT transformation.

The full State of IT Transformation Report (PDF) can be downloaded here.

Where do Organizations Want to Improve Most in 2016?

Cloud Infrastructure

While more than 90% of organizations are only in the early stages of evaluating a well-engineered hybrid cloud architecture, and 91% of organizations have no organized, consistent means of evaluating workloads for hybrid cloud, 70% want to standardize on a hybrid cloud architecture across the organization within the next two years.

Operating Model

Running IT like a customer-focused business is a high priority for IT organizations, but 88% of companies have not begun, or are only in the preliminary stages of developing skills in business-facing service definition, and only 24% have a well developed service catalog in place.

Organizations recognize that collaboration is key to meeting customer expectations, with 95% of organizations expressing that having no silos and working together to deliver business-focused services at the lowest cost this is critical. However, less than 4% of organizations reported that they currently operate like this.

Agility is also critical to success. For over half of the participants it currently takes between a week and a month to provision infrastructure resources. The goal this year for 77% of participants is to be able to do this in less than a day, or dynamically when needed.

Applications

Accelerating application development is a high priority for CIOs this year. 68% of the organizations surveyd take 6-12 months to complete a new development cycle. This is likely due to the fact that 82% of the companies currently don’t have a scalable, infrastructure-independent application delivery framework on which to rapidly and consistently build mobile-friendly, cloud-native apps.

How does your organization stack up?

If you need assistance identifying the gaps in your own organization, and developing a comprehensive strategy and roadmap for moving forward, contact your VMware Advisory Services strategist or your local VMware representative today.

The modern business environment is fast, fluid, complex and ambiguous. Businesses in all markets are embattled and face challenges and threats both internally and externally.

In order to adapt, survive and thrive, business strategies should be fluid, adaptable and innovative. From an implementation perspective, strategy should be well communicated to all levels of the organization.

Challenges in IT Strategy Definition

For many organizations, IT strategy definition occurs infrequently and is based on protecting current position and revenue streams, not taking into account feedback from middle and front line tiers of the business. Furthermore that strategy is not clearly communicated to the business, or even within the IT organization.

This broken process for strategy definition results in tactics and plans that are often watered down, inadequate and not geared towards leveraging the unique strengths of the company. For example, a company may say that their strategy is to “improve operating efficiency and provide excellent customer service.” This strategy only brings their IT department up to par with everyone else, it does not provide any competitive advantage.

To find unique and creative competitive advantages many enterprises adapt an inclusive approach to strategy and develop frameworks such as Top-Down, Bottom-Up and Middle-Out. This approach recognizes that IT is not only a support function that underpins business processes, but a source of competitive advantage that can provide innovative services that will help drive the strategy and success of the company as a whole.

Top-Down, Bottom-Up and Middle-Out

On their own Top-Down, Bottom-Up and Middle-Out strategies are only partially effective. What is required for effective strategy selection and for the development of rationalized strategies is coordination between all three approaches.

Top-Down

The strategy is established by senior management, and filters down the ranks. Often implementation is not well supported and results are lacking.

Bottom-Up

Strategies developed here focused on specific improvement initiatives and address specific needs, they are typically managed by a single group and manager and are effective.

The downside is that the improvement may occur only in a single area, may not be institutionalized and can lead to complexity and inconsistency. Shadow IT and unsanctioned IT Services can occur.

Middle-Out

Middle management is where the strategies that enable competitive advantages can be championed and communicated. The effective Bottom-Up strategies developed at the frontline can be supported, nurtured, advocated for and developed by finding sponsors at the executive level, elevating bottom-up strategies to top-down strategies. Middle management is also effective at translating Top-Down strategies from High-level language into Operational activities to be executed at the frontline

Combined, these represent a force for developing action out of strategy that ultimately drives innovation and finding the illusive competitive advantages.

As I visit customers, I have heard similar feedback about vRealize Operations (vROPs): “It’s a great product but we are not getting the best out of it.” The unfortunate reality is that they are probably right! There is often a large gap between the wide range of possibilities and functionalities that vROPs can offer to the SDDC/Cloud environment and the real way in which it´s being consumed. This could be preventing your IT organization from getting the best from the product and impacting your investment. For many companies that investment is not insignificant, as it includes licensing, professional and educational services, and dedicated resources to manage it.

The challenges are often related to more than just technology and require looking at the operational aspects of the solution such as your specific operating model / environment, how your IT organization is structured or what IT processes you have defined and are running.

A consistent methodology is crucial if you want to maximize your investments in vROPs, and this will include the identification of improvement areas (formulated into a set of actionable recommendations) and the subsequent implementation of them into your IT organization:

Understand your specific environment through a set of discovery workshops with the key stakeholders focused on your IT strategy & organization, your existing roles & responsibilities and your defined processes related to performance and capacity.

Produce an assessment report with the key findings & early state recommendations.

Consolidate & transform the assessment report content into a comprehensive set of proposed recommendations and roadmap.

Present assessment findings & roadmap to the executive team as a sponsorship checkpoint. This will reinforce commitment and will identify key initiatives.

Implementation of the agreed recommendations across your IT organization.

Measure and validate the success of the implemented recommendations focusing on the utilization of vROps and the stakeholder´s feedback!

Based on our experience delivering this methodology across many customers, we have been able to identify some key common considerations that will drive the success of this initiative:

Every customer environment is specific: We see different levels of maturity across processes, political issues across the teams, change readiness of the IT organization, teams in siloes with collaboration issues, etc. That´s why the initial phases of the approach are critical for the success: the better we understand you, the better we will articulate the improvement recommendations and engage with the required impacted people!

Sponsorship is crucial to promote the benefits and break the resistance to change across the IT organization. Motivate your IT organization using a top-down approach. Effective communication is the key to success.

Stakeholder identification and involvement during the early stages of the assessment is key to ensure involvement and commitment and capture their unique viewpoint. Miss a key stakeholder and you will miss a key input!

Leverage existing initiatives that are in place or planned to start in the organization that can have an impact on vROps (e.g. application monitoring, log management, cloud transformation). This will facilitate expanding the adoption of vROps by integrating smoothly into your ecosystem.

What typical areas do we focus on when identifying recommendations for our customers?

After reading about the methodology and key considerations some of you might be thinking that this is nothing really new. You may wonder what concrete examples of operational recommendations we can offer to enhance the adoption of vROps.

It is important that you first understand the methodology and how we normally get to those recommendations. It is a journey in which we discover information about our customers while at the same time educating and inspiring them to do things differently. If we present the recommendations directly missing this critical inspirational element, it is less likely that the transformation will be absorbed, and more likely that the implementation will fail.

Having reviewed the methodology and the key considerations, a high-level example of operational areas that we normally focus on may include:

Expanding the information in vRealize Operations across other teams in the IT organization (e.g. Level 1 Operators, Level 2 Admins, Business teams, DevOps groups).

Defining workflows in VMware Orchestrator that automate the execution of repetitive tasks and / or the resolution of detected events in vRealize Operations.

Sometimes it is important to step back from the day-to-day activities, analyze your current environment (including both the good practices and the areas of development), and then think about different ways to bring value to your existing solutions. And this is exactly why VMware offers our Ops Transformation Performance & Capacity Management services – to help our customers to maximize their vRealize Operations investments by driving them towards different ways of doing things…because if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get the same results!

—-Alberto Martinez is an operations architect with the VMware Operations Transformation EMEA practice and is based in Spain.

Many people familiar with ITSM have heard the expression ‘adopt & adapt’ as a good practice, but it’s worth noting the order in which these words are placed. You must adopt before you can adapt. This leads to the question, when has a process been ‘adopted’?

If a process doesn’t have a purpose, or if the process purpose is not understood by the organization, it is hard to consider it implemented. If a process is performed so inconsistently or irregularly over time or in different business units, that it does not systematically achieve its purpose, it has not been adopted.

At this level, more efforts are needed to adopt the process. This may require transitional change efforts that may include strategy, structures, and/or systems.

Performed Process

If the process achieves its purpose it’s normally considered ‘adopted’, even if the relative maturity is low. The organization understands the purpose of the process and there is evidence that the outcomes of the process are achieved, such as the production of a document, change of state or meeting a goal.

Reviewing the base practices associated with the process can help determine whether all the desired outcomes of the process are achieved, even if some specific outputs (i.e., work products) are not in evidence.

At this level of maturity, the process can be adapted and improved. This requires developmental change efforts; project plans that should communicate the changes and provide knowledge transfer to key stakeholders.

Why is this important?

When we are adapting multiple processes as part of an ITaaS or SDDC transformation, even a single incomplete process can significantly increase the scope of the effort. You cannot adapt what has not been adopted!

ITaaS Transformation and Established Processes

Incident Management is typically a process that has been adopted. For example, all these objectives[ii] may be met:

Ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt response, analysis, documentation, ongoing management and reporting of incidents

Increase visibility and communication of incidents to business and IT support staff

Enhance business perception of IT through use of a professional approach in quickly resolving and communicating incidents when they occur

Align incident management activities and priorities with those of the business

Maintain user satisfaction with the quality of IT services

Even if the process documentation is not elaborate the process may be achieving its purpose and providing its expected outcomes. It’s not uncommon for organizations to have this process formally described, have trained practitioners, be well supported by tools and standardized across the organization. These would characterize this as Level 3 (Established) maturity.

In this case, vRealize Operations can integrate easily with the process (i.e., by automatically creating Incident records in the tool) as appropriate.

ITaaS Transformation and Incomplete Processes

In an ITaaS transformation, capacity management can be an example of an incomplete process. For example, the following objectives[iii] of capacity management may be difficult to achieve:

Produce and maintain an appropriate and up-to-date capacity plan, which reflects the current and future needs of the business

Ensure that service performance achievements meet all of their agreed targets by managing the performance and capacity of both services and resources

Assist with the diagnosis and resolution of performance and capacity related incidents and problems

If IT services are not well defined, if the problem management process is not established, or if the capacity management process is not well supported (by people and technology) then it is common that it would not meet Level 1 (Performed) requirements.

The use of vRealize Operations can address the technology process support requirements, but you will still need to define services to manage service performance and you will still need to establish problem management as a process in order to assist with capacity related problems. You may also need to establish roles associated with capacity and performance management that are not currently well defined in the organization.

[Note: it is not required that an ITIL-based process be in existence, but the process will still need to be considered performed (adopted) in order to adapt.]

Adopt or Adapt is not a matter of choice

You do not choose developmental, transitional or transformational change; you discover what change is required based on organizational demands[iv]. This is why assessment and discovery activities are so important. These activities make sure your implementation plans have the inputs needed to ensure a complete plan, and the appropriate developmental, transitional and/or transformational strategies.

In the examples provided, we can easily adapt the existing incident management process to ITaaS. However, there may be more work needed to establish capacity management and related processes. The level of effort needed to achieve this can vary significantly based on organizational requirements, objectives and your starting point.

Understanding this is key to establishing a transformation path that minimizes effort and maximizes the value out of the people, processes and technology — in other words, developing ITaaS organizational capabilities.

In the vast majority of cloud implementations the integration between the self-service provisioning workflow and the configuration management system (CMS) will need to be addressed.

On the surface the use case is a ‘no brainer’. Once a cloud infrastructure service has been provisioned we want to ensure that the newly created configuration items are recorded in the CMS so that IT can support the new service. Incidents occurring in the newly created infrastructure need to be detected, managed and resolved.

In most cases the IT Operations team will be relying on an IT Service Management toolset for its day-to-day activities. In this typical scenario, we would need a technical integration between the provisioning workflow engine and the IT Service Management toolset.

In order to enable IT Support with Event and Incident Management, we need the newly created workloads (or applications) to be “visible” from the Service Management toolset. This means creating the configuration items in the service management toolset’s configuration management system (CMS). Vendors of service management tools have various approaches to their configuration management system, but in principle this will require the creation of configuration records in their CMS.

Here’s the simplified diagram:

However the range of integration scenarios is by no means limited to event/incident management. There is actually a broad range of possible scenarios including:

Change Management – tracking updates to the configuration items that have been created

Financial Management – being able to evaluate the cost of newly created item, which In turn will enable chargeback, billing and more broadly help meet the financial requirement

Compliance & security – being able to verify that the infrastructure meets corporate policy and security standards as appropriate

Given the number of possible use cases, it is important to decide early on which the key scenarios will be. Which processes do you want to enable as a priority?

That initial decision will drive the complexity of the technical integration, especially the number of parameters and values being passed around.

The Technical Side of Integration: Tools & Guidance

Fortunately when it comes to the technical side, there are many options to integrate VMware vRealize Operations into a third party tool. The typical avenue is to leverage the connectivity features of VMware vRealize Orchestrator.

On the other side of the integration, we will have an IT Service Management (ITSM) toolset (from vendors such as BMC, HP, CA, ServiceNow, and many others).

The integration workflow reflects the process requirements: typically, creating Configuration Items (CI’s) in the Service Management toolset and passing on CI information.

However one aspect that can be easily overlooked when first setting up the integration, is to build in resilience. For example, the ability for this integration to handle exceptions and errors.

Another key to resilience is to consider the operational aspects of the integration itself.

Maintenance is often where integrations fail over the long run – the organization lacks the resources or roles to keep the integration up to date. It is recommended to assign someone the responsibility for maintaining this integration.

The skills to maintain the integration may need to be developed and refreshed.

Your Take-Aways

These three angles must be covered to produce a robust integration SDDC-ITSM:

People: decide how your organization will maintain this integration for the long term (and who will maintain it). Ensure than the relevant skills (and knowledge) is retained to keep the integration up to date in the future.

Process: decide on the key process (use cases) for the integration – and document them.

Technology: Leverage exiting tools and know-how – no need to re-invent the wheel. Build in resilience early on: plan for exception handling, testing and future version upgrades early in the development of the technical integration.

—-Pierre Moncassinis an operations architect with the VMware Operations Transformation global practice and is based in the UK.

More collaboration is a noble goal. Make the reality match the promise.

The concept of DevOps is so appealing. Who wouldn’t agree that better communication between development and operations teams will expedite release cycles, improve software quality, and make the business more agile? Just one question: why is DevOps still a “concept” at most companies rather than an operational reality? The short answer is that DevOps requires new ways of working, and that can create cultural upheaval.

Download 3 Top Tips for Optimizing DevOps from our Consultant Corner for guidance around addressing the people and process issues of DevOps in a VMware environment—so you can reap the business benefits sooner.

Approximating staffing ratios in a cloud organization as a logarithmic function of infrastructure metrics.

By Pierre Moncassin

Customers who want to establish true cloud services based on VMware’s SDDC solution (or any other provider for that matter), realize that in order to fully leverage the technology, they need to adapt their IT organization.

More specifically, they need to setup a dedicated team – a cloud Center of Excellence (COE) to manage and operate their cloud services.

Now these 10 factors, and probably hundreds of other factors will determine the complexity of the tasks that the cloud organization needs to perform and therefore, the staffing level. Clearly there are thousands of possible combinations of these factors. But if I want to see how the FTE count evolves with a single , easy-to-quantify parameter (such as number of virtual machines or any other ‘simple’ infrastructure metric’), we need to make strict assumptions to ‘tie down’ the other factors.

So let’s assume that we are looking at a single organization evolving over time; as time passes the number of virtual machines gradually increases, but so does the number and complexity of the services, as well as the demand for support coverage:

Between 1 and 100 VM’s, the COE is running as a pilot, there are no support requirements, only a small number of services to run.

Between 100 and 1000 VM’s., the COE is running cloud services regionally with some basic service levels.

Over say, 30,000 VM’s, the COE is now running a global operation with 24/7 support requirement and a broad range of services.

Practical observation of a number of real-life examples suggests an evolution broadly similar to the logarithmic curve in figure 1. Now this is still a model that deliberately simplifies and ‘smooths out’ the FTE curve, but there are two practical implications:

The staffing levels may rise most steeply at the beginning of the curve. When the organization transitions from a pilot to a fully operating COE, the staffing need levels rise significantly.

The FTE curve flattens out then the organization matures and can handle high volumes. Once the COE is operating with a high level of automation with experienced staff, adding workload only requires a marginal increase to the FTE’s count.

In reality of course the complexity – i.e. the demand on FTE – never grows quite linearly.

We would see threshold effects. For example when we reach 300 worksloads, a new 24×7 service may be added to the portfolio, which requires a rapid increase in FTE.

Take-aways:

The faster rise in FTE will occur in the early stages of build-up of cloud services; this is ‘normal’ given that we see an increase altogether of the number of services and the service levels and therefore significantly increasing the demands on the cloud organization;

Once well established and automated, the FTE level should only increase marginally with rising infrastructure volumes – your organization will have learned to cope with increasing quantities.

We need to caveat that although the FTE curve may look broadly logarithmic, threshold effects are inevitable: new demands on service level (eg new compliance requirements, 24×7 etc) can create an ‘uptick’ in FTE without necessarily a prior ‘uptick’ in volumes.

What we have presented here in an intuitive model to understand how increasing volumes impact FTE. You are welcome to share your experience and perhaps refine this heuristic model.

—-Pierre Moncassin is an operations architect with the VMware Operations Transformation global practice and is based in the UK.

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About this Blog

This blog is for busy people who do things. And for people who make decisions about how to do things. It offers applied insights and lessons learned for IT infrastructure and operations professions responsible for building, managing and optimizing IT Operations in the cloud era.